Edublog

Day: January 15, 2018

I thought it was a interesting activity to make people think outside the box, it was fun having all of us share our ideas and improvise on what ingredients to use within the classroom especially when we were given the secret ingredient of kale and butternut squash. It opened up so many possibilities for us and it got even more interesting when we were told to only use with what we could find within the school which tensed up the whole situation and made the whole event ten times more difficult which I did enjoy.

How did the group make decisions?

My group thought that the school didn’t have “good” ingredients to work with and we were thinking about simple dishes, such as soups, salads or stuffed vegetables. We all came in to a conclusion that the dish that requires the least amount of ingredients and prep/cooking time, not because we were lazy but we wanted to make sure we were ready for the judges to taste our dishes. The stuffed butternut squash or coconut soup were our last two choices, we didn’t bother with salad because we thought that sounded too simple and boring. The stuffed butternut only had a couple of ingredients that weren’t in the school so we all chose to do the soup since we had everything in the school and it only took around 30 minutes to cook, unlike the stuffed butternut, it required it to be stuffed with heavy amounts of cheese and we needed to bake it for a decent amount of time

How did we choose this recipe?

My group chose the butternut squash curry coconut soup, we thought soups were simple and a bit unique since we didn’t we much butternut squash soup around, and we also had almost every ingredient besides a simple Thai curry paste. Prep time was almost 15 minutes and cooking time was 30 minutes, which gave us enough time for the judges to settle in and allowed us to serve the soup to them while it was still hot or warm.

I honestly didn’t care what dish we chose, all I wanted was that it was simple and it would impress the judges, we first thought about stir fry, or cupcakes, I was open to them but some of us wanted simpler dishes. Soups were simple enough but I wasn’t the one that recommended it, someone in my group did and one of our group members objected the idea but we finally convinced that group member and decided to make a soup.

What would I do differently?

I probably wouldn’t change much, maybe lower the amounts of coconut milk that was added and introduce more of the Thai curry paste in to the soup, it didn’t seem to be a bad dish since the judges and my group loved the taste, texture and style of it.

How did time/ingredients affect the group?

We were over confident with our dish, we thought that boiling the squash and just blending them would be as easy as pie, but when the squash didn’t soften, we hard boiled the squash for 5 minutes instead of letting them simmer for 18 minutes and eventually we just blended it in a different bowl while slowly incorporating the milk and squash, if we had more time, the soup wouldn’t have squash chunks and the design with the coconut soup could’ve been a lot nicer, but we were rushed so we couldn’t make it look as good as we wanted it to be.